Saturday, May 22, 2010

Sex & Death

"Sex sells," and as the newspapers say, "if it bleeds, it leads." If "sex sells," then what exactly is it selling? Long ago in some distant foggy memory I had read or heard about the idea of anchoring ideas to specific emotional states, and how movies create and release tension through pictures and music/sound effects. So, I decided that sex was a pretty strong emotion, and payed attention to what it was being anchored to. Turns out the answer, more times than not, is death. Many, many times, a scene of death precedes, follows, or runs parallel to a scene of sex, flashing back and forth between the two scenes. Sex is selling us death. But is it a mythological subconscious archetype linking death to regeneration like winter leads into spring, or would that be too optimistic an appraisal of the magick being worked in the Holy Woods of Los Angeles?

Most sex and death scenes happen in "cop drama" type shows or bad movies, neither of which I own, so I made due with what I had which should be sufficient to support that I'm on to something here! I left out of this video a scene from 1996's Crash because it didn't fit so well. However, this film depicts characters who have linked sexual pleasure to the excitement and fear of car crashes, and to the mutilation of the human body, as well as the mechanization of a repaired body, held together by pins, stitches, and other medical apparatus. Is there an intended or unintended side-effect of this movie trope which, over time through repetition, causes people to feel violent when thinking of sex and feel turned on when thinking of violence? Something to keep our base instincts overstimulated and to leave little room for higher instincts to come into play. I was flipping through my dad's old copy of the Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and on the inside of the cover he wrote: "Deprived by science of the capacity to make moral choices, Alex becomes a “clockwork orange,” something mechanical that appears organic."

Despite the possible programming usage of Sex & Death, it does represent a duality of types, since all things that are created through sexual or creative energy will dissolve away in a type of death at some point or another, as Osho and Joseph Campbell pointed out.

For the French, an orgasm is la petite mort, the little death. Wikipedia calls it a "spiritual release that comes with orgasm," presumably as a metaphor for the release of the spirit at death.

While traditionally left unnamed, the 13th tarot card of the Major Arcana featuring a Grim Reaper, or similar character, is named "La Mort," (Death) as seen in the popular Rider-Waite-Smith tarot. La Mort is an easy anagram of Mortal, which would indicate life, and thus a duality of life(sex/generation) and death hidden in the card. Also, L-a-M-o-r-t contains L-AMOR-t, and amor means love, as seen in the phrase Amor vincit omnia, "love conquers all" (even death?).

Here's some stuff I forgot to add when I published this post, just more random Sex & Death stuff:

"Ultimately, I have to come to terms with the fact that all my songs are either about sex or death. I'm increasingly distrustful of any songs that are not about one of those two subjects." - “JT” of JT & The Clouds

35 comments:

I'll watch when the kids are in bed tonight... Been looking forward to this.. However I'm not so sure there is any other intentional programing here besides survival. If you'll allow me to be both honest and vulgar I noticed at a very young age, say 5 or 6, that when pretending to kill off my action figures I got a hard on. If I suddenly said that they had actually survived the hard on went away. I couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on but did it a couple of times "to repeat the experiment".

Life is Death and Death is Life.. As you said. We die because of sex and we have sex because we die.

Violence I think creates the want to procreate hence 911 babies and the WW2 baby boom.

I get confused off of some of the things you say, not out of disrespect mind you, I just hear you say all the following view points (which I actually like by the way). Life imitates art, art imitates life, art attempts to control life... I guess you not sticking to the ammunition of one attracts me although I really don't think that art can reprogram basic wiring we are born with in a movie we see once. I think that our hard wiring creates the movie.

But to tell the truth I have no idea whats going on.

We might have to wait a month for our talk, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Will, You reminded me of a Terence McKenna quote I couldn't find for this video. He talks about his first realization of sex and death was at the circus with the trapeze artists in their skin tight outfits flying around in the air barely escaping certain death if they fell. Something primal about it.

That clip about tv being the retina of the world was most interesting.

I apologise but I couldn't watch your hard work - have never been able to stomach violent death on screen plus I've been researching some real life murders which made it even harder.

However one thought I had while researching is that perhaps tv is there to guide our minds away from questioning real life slaughter - we've been taught that killers generally operate alone, have some sort of mental dysfunction or are motivated by greed or sex. As such we do not question when sex is a part of murder - it's always the sicko psycho. If a whole lot of people go missing over time & the ones that do turn up often have been sexually assaulted we all know that society is sick & there are lots of nutters around. The End.

.balthazar getty who we see here in the garage with juliette lewis via natural born killers plays an all too similar mechanic in lost highway directed by david lynch.you can see b.g. as pete the mechanic in the passenger seat here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzgmAgzpldU ...mechanic...gas station...getty...that reminds me... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Oil

in the beginning of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film) willem dafoe and charlotte gainsbourg have sex while their toddler nic climbs out of the crib and falls out the window and dies in the snowy ground down below as charlotte is shown in the ecstasy of climax.

Alex Robinson, oddly enough, I think after the title screen, only one person is shown being killed and he's shot and it's not violent. So, I think you can stomach it if you want to try. ;) Alex has pointed out that due to TV people think quiet loners are all psychopaths. I know in school as a loner people always joked I would go on a shooting spree one day, and they made comments like "it's always the quiet ones." :( The Joker in the latest Batman flick also states that people don't bat an eyelash at news reports of death because that's just part of normal everyday life. The research on Laurel Canyon situated North of Hollywood revealed a ton of sex-death cult activity. Most of the deaths were of course ruled to be "suicide."

startheory, yeah there were some parallels between the two. This video came from notes I took back when I was doing those podcasts with Alex, though I added some new stuff before I made the video, those notes did lead into the Death & Dairy research. I actually am friends with people of a small production company.. maybe I can get them to film a script by us.. no "initiation" required ;)

VJESCI, good points on the snuff films. I did see 8mm and The Black Dahlia (which had sex/death in it I think), but I already got a warning from my internet provider for downloading the movie I used for the opening scene, so I didn't want to risk internet disconnection getting any more movies. Besides I mostly went off old notes from mine and Alex's podcast days, so not much new stuff was added. Antichrist sounds odd to say the least. I love this line from Wikipedia on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: The film's title is a reference to Pauline Kael's 1968 book, which in turn was named after a translation of an Italian poster of a James Bond movie, which she called "perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of the movies."

Oh I just remembered I was going to add pictures to this post.. I'm so absent minded :/

mhh...reminds me of something I read somewhere many years ago. When we die we are supposed to have a "high/orgasm" (spirit release?) that is ~10x stronger than the effect of heroin if I remember correctly...I also heard that people who hang themselves (neck breaking version)are supposed to get an orgasm...

mace556, good point on the neck breaking theme. I think there's one or two of those in the link I just added to this post about death during sex (just above the pictuers).

Alex Robinson, the other Alex said something about sex becoming a sport basically with people using Viagra, and also club-goers are cutting Viagra into cocaine - it's basically another extreme sport fueled by energy drinks. :D I wonder if the toxicity in condoms is bringing down sperm counts, or maybe something like in Zardoz, when the immortals stopped having sex for procreation they became flacid.

(Thanks to some generous donations I have just about enough $ to add another stick of RAM to my computer - you have no idea how much I've been dying to do that! It'll definitely come in handy in my next project.)

There is blood in my semen. I went to get it checked out by way of the Emergency Room Doctor on call. She told me it was common for young men to find blood in there. I told her it was almost an even ratio of blood/semen. She checked the prostate and ran blood and urine tests. All Of which, checked out...so far.

When she was done talking to me I asked her if I should be abstinent for the time being. She said as long as it doesn't hurt then I'm sure you won't do any damage. She said I could have sex, while making eye contact with me. I had uncontrollable images of sex enter my mind and I turned my gaze away from hers as I was embarrassed.

Very informative video, the only thing I disliked was the white noise ("switching channels") sound. I tried watching it with my headphones on and it's really annoying. Maybe in the future you could make it less harsh, or something.

JonccidenddiK, Yeah it does seem to go by fast doesn't it. Interesting health issues. Makes me think of the mixture of menstrual blood and semen, or the redding phase of alchemy. A strange duality at play there. Get well soon I guess, unless it's some sign of christhood, which in that case, keep it up (pun intended?)!

deltawerken, Yeah I almost softened the noise more but I felt like it had to be annoying to feel "real." Future videos are unlikely to use this same format; just for this one I wanted people to feel like they were watching TV (an old TV!) culminating in the ending which suggests you turn the TV off.

rubbernecking an accident on the highway is a form of sex/pornography. most people get their rocks off by seeing blood and guts in person, just as they do when watching a horror flick.... hence, sex & death. i don't think they realize what feeling they're experiencing when they see the death. call it a morbid curiosity, but i see it as more of sexual perversion.

raffi, yes morbid curiosity is part of why "if it bleeds, it leads" but sexual perversion is part of it as well. I mentioned this in relation to the vampire shows on tonights Rebel Path radio show (sorry, didn't give anyone a heads up!).

Alex will probably post a link to the archive of the show soon, or I'll find one. Pretty fun show, some good calls, including Metro Bob expressing his "opinion."

Oh, before I forget, I found this a few weeks back and thought some of you might want to know, someone made a The Stygian Port facebook page that I guess updates everytime there's a new post here. I don't actually have a facebook account, so it musta been made by a "fellow soul traveler" unless the artificial intelligent Google computers thought I was getting enough internet hits to warrent my own facebook page. So check that out if you have facebook!

James, it was a silver sun, and the revolver had 5 chambers, don't remember the blue flowers, hafta check. Hey, interesting link about the Sargasso; did you notice it was mentioned in one of the sea shanties in this video? I had that word "Sargasso" stuck in my head a couple weeks ago, so it's synchriffic that you send me that link! :D

The moniker of 'crimes of passion' used a lot of times where someone cheated on someone else and ended up dead (because of having sex with the wrong person) has become sort of acceptable in the 'public eye' - where we say 'that poor man/woman - they were driven to kill'...that kind of thing. There's a good oldish movie, mixing multiple personalities, sex and death/murder, called Jade(1995) starring David Caruso (CSI Miami) and Linda Fiorentino (of The Last Seduction fame). The byline of the film is 'Some fantasies go too far'...is that too far down the rabbit hole perhaps?

o' tanks for the correct observation. Didn't notice the Sargossa in the past Stynk video. Trying to Google it, I found myself commenting it on yours and somebody else's blogs in the past. The Sex & Death Electric Eel region with strange Magnetic Properties near the Bermuda Triangle / (Devil's) Tongue of the Ocean / Steepest Peak in the World (regardless of sea level) ... maybe it's where they filmed Lost ... Yona Guni is supposedly the same thing on the other side of the planet, heard it through the Assassin's Creed game ... possible Atlantean back stories and Earth Grid Peaks of Interest, maybe like an old Pole before a shift?

regal eagle, Oh yeah I remember that link you sent me about the electric eels. I had heard that near Japan, opposite the Bermuda "triange" is another "triange" called the Devil's Sea (I think?). It's as if some Platonic Solid inside the earth with its vertices touching the surface of the earth at these points. Actually I have a picture of the earth with a grid over it, sectioned in triangles, though I don't know if it's based on ley lines or just someones imagination. They say Atlantis had some crystal power source, but maybe the crystals were powered by the lines. Hmm, didn't Lex Luthor try to make a crystal island in the more recent Superman movie?

According to esoteric theories of how humankind came to be, priot to our current, fleshly existence we lived on the etheric plane in a vegetative state. The coming of Lucifer/Venus introduced desire into human nature, thus the fall. Desire is always wanting something we don't have, in the case of the fall this meant the ability to raom free as an animal instead of a plant. But we also fell into incarnation - in to the flesh - and the flesh, being an impermanent compound creation, dies. Thus desire, sex and death are very closely bound up (pardon the expression). The Gnostics believed that this physical life is in fact (spiritual) death, and only he who is raised to life (as with Lazarus, and modern Freemasons) is worthy of life.